By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2012
In early 2012, a small reshuffle at The Huffington Post hinted at how the site was managing its fast-growing identity verticals.
Then
FishbowlLA, citing Richard Prince’s column at the Maynard Institute, reported a personnel change at the top of HuffPost’s Black and Latino sites. Gene Demby, the editor of HuffPost BlackVoices, was stepping down to become a political editor at the Huffington Post. Rather than hire a new managing editor, HuffPost folded the role in: LatinoVoices editor Miguel Ferrer would now oversee both verticals.
Demby had run BlackVoices only since the previous October. Even with the turnover, FishbowlLA noted, the site was a real audience success — its roughly 2.6 million monthly unique visitors trailed only BET.com among Black-oriented sites.
Now
The most lasting thread in this item turned out to be Gene Demby’s own career. He left HuffPost for NPR, where he co-founded Code Switch — the influential team and podcast covering race, ethnicity and identity — and became one of the best-known journalists working that beat.
HuffPost’s identity verticals had a rockier run. The Huffington Post was sold by AOL-owner Verizon to BuzzFeed in 2020, shed staff, and narrowed considerably from the sprawling network of sections it had built in the early 2010s. The 2012 consolidation of two editor jobs into one, modest as it looked at the time, was an early sign of the contraction to come.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.